


Truth Takes Time

by voodoochild



Series: Challenge on Infinite Earths [7]
Category: The Hour
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Espionage, F/M, Soviet Union
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-02
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 10:52:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/952215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the land of her father, Alexis is a boy's name. [A different Spy AU; what if Lix were the Soviet mole from S1?]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truth Takes Time

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Challenge on Infinite Earths, day 14, "allegiance swap". Title from Alias, though nothing else is thieved from that, despite how badly I'd love to see a Jack/Irina style relationship between Lix and Randall.

In the land of her father, Alexis is a boy's name.

Yekaterina herself is ill-named; "torture", because her father wanted a strong son to carry on his name. And so Yekaterina Petronova Volkova became her father's son, earning her education and proving her worth to the family. The GPU love unwanted little girls, because they're the easiest to mold into the type of person it takes to press a gun between a traitor's eyes and pull the trigger. 

You kill your father over and over, when you become a Chekist, a шпион. 

Spies don't have identities, because each kill strips away a small piece of who you were before. Leaves you hollow as the barrel of a gun, cold as the motherland. Katya became very good at it indeed, so when the Chekists needed someone to send to London, to become a Londoner and blend in, she was honored to be given the assignment. Live as a wealthy young Londoner, make contacts wherever possible, turn assets if she could. 

The accent isn't the hardest part of a new identity. Her English is impeccable; people find it charming, her low, cut-glass voice. She's posh in London, not Petrov's daughter from Drezna, factory workers all their lives. Going from a three-room cottage, smoke from the wooden stove permeating every inch of it, to a modern flat, clean and glittering, is astonishing. She'll become soft in London, hands losing their calluses and refrigerator containing only alcohol and bread.

No, the hardest part is building the new person, inhabiting them every waking moment of every day. She chose the name Alexis Storm and vowed that she would embody its promise - defender and tempest. She walked across every inch of London to learn it, absorb what Lix would have known since birth, and this allowed her to encounter people from all walks of life, learn how to interact with them. Sleeping with people for information is easy, she's been doing it since she first bled at thirteen, and it hasn't changed. She finds that Katya's fascination with women is allowed to be more, here; she can become the lover for a woman the same way she can for a man, and double her potential contacts.

Four years into her life as Alexis, she receives her next mission: follow the international brigade to Spain, see if there are any Falangistas in the ranks, and eradicate them. After learning English, Spanish is child's play, and a camera is simple to work when she's far more used to pistols and bombs.

What isn't simple is another new life to add to her cover. Lix-in-Spain is eager to try new things - eat paella in tiny cantinas, drink rioja with pretty milicianos and pretty milicianas, dance until dawn and watch the sun rise over the Plaza de Los Cortes. Every new bed she wakes up in is a risk, because in wartime, people see spies everywhere. She learns to be more careful, but appear as careless as ever, for Lix Storm hasn't faced consequences yet. Has never seen a row of men being executed in front of her one by one. Never seen a church or school bombed on suspicion of harboring enemies. Doesn't know what the air before a missile strike smells like.

She has to hide Katya further beneath Alexis, if she's to survive. 

***

There is a man in Spain, one who makes her feel like neither Lix nor Katya. 

His name is Randall Brown, he's a journalist and former soldier, and that second part makes her blood boil. You don't choose to stop being a soldier, where she comes from, and maybe Randall understands that, because the soldier in him comes out when he needs him to. The first time he field-stripped a pistol in front of her (part of his ritual, she hadn't known about it yet), she had to go lock herself in her bathroom and try to stop seeing his long, beautiful fingers moving so efficiently and deadly behind her eyes. When you're a spy, part of you learns to love the trappings, even if you don't love the killing. The potential in him is earth-shattering, and he runs alongside her toward battlefields like he understands the need to sift through the rubble.

She doesn't love journalism, yet. It's a cover, her photos are serviceable, but devoid of any real insight, and it shouldn't bother her, but Randall makes her want to be better. Makes her pay attention and react to the atrocities the _loyales_ are committing as much as the _nacionales_ \- they're her allies, she shouldn't judge, should be objective in her reports to the GPU, but when your country sends troops to shell churches and schools in a nation thousands of miles away, Lix, at least, cannot explain it away. 

She's never questioned before, either, and that's what frightens her even more than passionate, insightful Randall, who looks at her like she's a puzzle he wants to solve.

He's enough of a mystery himself. He was former British Army, but owns fascist literature. He can disassemble a gun in under a minute, but his hands shake when he hears artillery fire. He's perfectionist and critical of everyone, himself most of all, but when it's been a terrible day and they've drunk all the whiskey they can stand, he's burned papers and bloodied his hands against the wall. There are questions he raises, and she wonders whether or not she's found another spy in the ranks after all.

If he were anyone else, there would have been a telegram already prepared for Moscow. But she has committed the most unforgivable sin a spy can commit - she's let herself be compromised. She doesn't *want* to turn him in, doesn't want to be parted from him. His flat across from the Museo Prado has become their flat, his uncomfortable bed their bed, his clothing their clothing. There are days when she wakes up with a tightness around her heart and realizes it's his arms slung around her waist and his mouth against the back of her neck. He hits all of her most vulnerable spots without even trying.

And all the while, the newly-named NKVD are asking questions. Why hasn't she left Barcelona with the _internacionales_? What is so special about this journalist? Should he be imprisoned and interrogated? They're going to come looking for her. They'll find a woman who hasn't considered herself a spy in months, a woman who has betrayed her orders. 

Her decision is made for her by morning sickness and a thickening waist she won't be able to hide for much longer.

***

She leaves him in Barcelona and flees across Spain on the first train she can find. 

The train ride makes her sick, but to be fair, everything makes her sick. She cannot stand the smell of food, of animals, of other people, and she lies in her bunk trying to breathe, trying not to cry. She makes contact in Zaragoza with the NKVD, tells the local commander that her cover had been blown, she'd shot a Falangist and escaped. She tells many more lies - that she does not know the father of her child, that it could have been any one of a dozen _internacionales_ and he'd never come looking for her, that the Scottish journalist had been wounded in the last skirmish and was probably dead, that she didn't care - and the NKVD send her with an armed escort to Grenada, where she'll be kept under "observation". Her pregnancy saves her from interrogation, and for that, she will forever be grateful to Randall. 

Her daughter is born at midnight, sometime in high summer. She doesn't know the precise date since she hasn't been allowed to see a calendar or a newspaper for months. They do not allow her to see the girl, because to see her is to form a bond with her. She could spit, as if she had not bonded over nine months of swollen ankles and kicks to her bladder, but that is what her superiors believe, and either way, she is not allowed to even look upon her daughter. She imagines her face every day, hopes for Randall's eyes and her dark hair, hopes for neither of their noses. 

They do allow her to name the girl, and she names her child for the quality she most desires to find in herself - Sofia, for wisdom. 

There is a counselor in Grenada, an older woman with shockingly red hair they call "Baba Yuliya", whom she's assigned to see. Baba Yuliya tells her to put Randall and Sofia out of her mind; Randall is dead (that is what she's told them, isn't it, Yekaterina?) and Sofia will be raised by a good couple. Spies, of course, who need a child to complete their cover but cannot conceive, and she's saved their lives. She has given much to the motherland, and the motherland is grateful. If she keeps her head down and complies, she'll be sent back to the front, allowed to resume her cover.

She hates every second of it, but she does what they ask. Everything they ask, lets her daughter be raised by other people, trains a few new recruits in speaking Spanish with an English accent, resumes contact with the Herald and convinces them she'd gone to Grenada to flee the bombing - Barcelona had been turned into rubble and anyway, she had reports that a new offensive was going to be launched near the Ebro River. 

She throws herself into the Ebro campaign, bloodier than anything she's ever seen, and if she risks thinking about Randall or her daughter, good Catalonian tequila usually takes care of her sobriety for the next six hours, then the next six, and on it goes. She drinks, she fucks, she takes photographs and writes reports. She will not let herself remember.

They pull her out of Spain in 1939, because a new threat to Russia has begun - Britain and France are at war with Germany, and Stalin is not content with neutrality, invading Poland and Finland in short order. She's a valuable asset, a British journalist with contacts all over Europe, and they send her back to London. A few months later, she's assigned to infiltrate France, which she does just in time for Germany to occupy it. She speaks just enough German to convince the Nazis she's more use alive than sent back to London in a body bag like other journalists they've caught, and she begins writing three dispatches to send out - one to the Germans, one to the British, and a heavily coded one to the Russians. 

Some days, she forgets who she's supposed to be. It's dangerous enough that she quits drinking entirely. 

***

Life after the second World War quiets down considerably, and she returns to England a celebrated war correspondent.

Her minders at the MGB (another name change, the same work) allow her to choose whether or not to go overseas again or stay in London, and she picks London. She wants to live in a flat again, walk streets unhindered by roadside attacks. They place her at the BBC, where they have a number of agents already in place, and her supervisor is a man introduced to her as Clarence Fendley. 

Within five minutes of meeting Clarence, she's convinced of three things.

First, that she won't be made to sleep with a superior officer any longer. Second, that the quality of Soviet agents has dropped dramatically since her day, but the quality of vodka in England has improved. And third, Clarence may have a head for numbers and an ease at assimilation, but he doesn't know a damned thing about people.

The third thing is what really worries her, and she watches a number of potential assets slip through his fingers. She cultivates a few of her own, turns most of them, and the MGB are pleased with her work. She can't be the lead agent, though, because she's a woman and women are useful for any number of things, but giving orders isn't one of them. She must stay in the background, quietly and utterly competent, and clean up the messes the other agents cause.

Bollocks to *that*, she thinks, and goes after a few new reporters that have started down in Editing. They're practically children, Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon, both twenty-two and painfully brilliant. They want to be "real" journalists, and though they're willing to slog along for the time being, they're both ambitious enough to begin planning for when they can break real news. Freddie's familiar enough with her work to lap up everything she tells him as if it's gospel - she won't fuck him, not until later, when there's an emotional connection she can also play on - and throws himself into stories the way an obsessive, perfectionist man in Spain she once knew did. Bel is more perceptive than anyone gives her credit for and a born producer, but nearly yearning for a female role model she can respect.

Lix Storm is someone they can both admire and befriend. Lix Storm has lived a life they both want. Lix Storm isn't nearly as suspicious as Clarence Fendley.

It's six years of very delicate work. She doesn't know about Brightstone, and it's her only saving grace when Freddie goes digging. She has no demonstrable connection to that cell or to Clarence, and when Kish (one of her best assets, damn it) turns up dead and MI5 starts sniffing around, she realizes what's happened. Someone got to Freddie long ago, no wonder he'd make a good agent, and she redoubles her alibis, makes sure she's with either Freddie or Bel or in her office for the foreseeable future.

Sleeping with Freddie is half a failure of willpower and half a need to get them both an alibi for the night she shoots Clarence Fendley in the head and drops him into the Thames.

***

Unfortunately, while Five goes away, Freddie's nose for a story does not. He gets himself sacked over the Ruth Elms investigation, and nothing she can do can change the board's mind. 

Everything's crashing down around her, and her dispatches to Moscow are becoming sparser and sparser on details. She thinks she might be blown, and a few weeks after she'd packed Freddie off to Mexico (the boy had never even asked how she'd procured plane tickets on such short notice), the board calls her in. They're beginning a full inquiry into everyone connected to both Clarence and Freddie, starting with her, since she's the next most senior employee. It's three hours of the most inept interrogation she's ever endured, and she emerges into her office to find Bel waiting for her, near tears.

The girl is bright and she knows she's going to have to sell out Freddie to keep her job. She's torn, and while Lix tells her to stick to the facts, the basics, tell the entire truth, Katya tells her she also can't give them an inch of rope to hang anyone, least of all Freddie, and downplay her own control of the show. Hang Clarence out to dry, and Bel is shocked. Isn't it bad enough he was a spy? Isn't it bad enough he put them all in danger?

It's enough, she thinks, to convince her that it was a good thing she never made a serious attempt to turn Bel asset. Too soft, and she wonders when she started thinking as a commander, rather than a soldier.

The BBC conduct their witch hunt, pin the entire thing on Clarence, and pat themselves on the back for ferreting out a communist spy. She stays where she is, reassures Moscow that only one of their deep cover agents has been unmasked, and asks for senior command of the BBC cell. She receives it, along with a commendation for her part in the containment. The other agents begin straightening in her presence, addressing her more formally, and she has to have private talks with each one of them. They can't suddenly begin treating Lix Storm like anything but the half-drunken lush she's supposed to be, can't look at her oddly for calling them "darling" and "sweetheart".

Christ, she's their first identifiable superior officer, and she has to go back to her flat and drink an entire bottle of whisky to deal with that headache.

It only gets worse. She has an entire network of assets to coordinate, a group of relatively green spies to wrangle, Bel to shepherd through her own inquiry, and then the board of governors call her in again. This time, Hector and Bel have been summoned with her, and they've got no idea what could be going on either. The board are beginning the search for a new director of news, and as the flagship show, the Hour will be his primary purview. They have no intention of allowing either Lix or Bel to fill the position, but at least they're consulting them about the candidates. She flips through the CV's, most of them vastly underqualified tossers from Kensington and Mayfair, but stops dead at the last name in the pile.

Randall Brown.

She barely hears the governors and Bel haggling over who maintains creative control, because it's him. She pours over the dates and information, Spain and Belgium and India and Algeria and New York and France, from war correspondent to foreign desk to producer to director of news, and she should bin the damned thing immediately. Give the board misinformation - worse, give them the truth about his eccentricities and his perfectionism. Anything to keep him as far away from her as she can.

But the Hour deserves the best. It's her show, as much as anyone else's, and she wants it to be the best. It needs a director as skilled and passionate as Randall, someone with the convictions to run every story worth devoting attention to, and not taking orders from the BBC or government flunkies. If she allows one of the tossers to take the position, they'll be off the air in a matter of months.

"Douglas," she says, lighting a cigarette to steady her hands. "I've got your new director. Ring the Paris bureau and tell them you're nicking Mr. Brown."

***

There are a number of calls to France, and she's invited in on the meeting where they see him in person, offer him the job. She declines, for obvious reasons.

She's got an escape to orchestrate, after all. 

She can't stay in London, let alone Lime Grove, if he's going to be here, and she puts an emergency call into Moscow. Tells the MGB that the BBC are becoming more suspicious in the wake of Clarence's death, that they might be on to the entire ring. They get a ticket to Poland to her through one of her assets, and it's for the afternoon Randall's supposed to start at Lime Grove. She's got to be there that morning, has to leave at the last minute to minimize suspicion, but her stomach is twisting into knots for the first time in years.

1:36 pm, four minutes to when she's planning to duck out the back stairwell, hail a cab in the street behind the studio, and she hears a knock on her door. Hears Bel's voice, and she kicks her suitcase under her desk, hides the ticket and the gun she hasn't needed to carry in eleven years in her desk drawer. Calls out that it's open, and instead of just Bel, she's leading a tall, thin man into the room, and her heart stops.

Randall.

Too-thin, too-smart, too-obsessive Randall in a pinstriped suit and glasses hiding his pretty blue eyes. Her mouth opens - to scream, gasp, she doesn't know - and before she can do anything, Randall cuts off Bel's smiling introductions.

"You can go now, Miss Rowley. I'm sure you have tonight's show to see to."

Bel leaves, but Lix - Katya - she doesn't know who she is anymore . . . she can't take her eyes off him. Barely dares to breathe, and she steels herself, picks her cigarette back up and inhales.

"Hello," she says, and his voice cracks as he laughs.

"Christ, Lix - I didn't - I thought it must have been a mistake. How many Alexis Storms are there? But here you sit."

"Here I sit."

He stares at her, covetously, the way he used to when she was nude and smiling in front of him, as if he never wanted to let her go. His hand twitches to his pocket, retrieves a cigarette lighter that he flicks opens and closed - once, twice, three times - and rubs his thumb over the lid. 

"You're still doing it, aren't you?" he says, and she doesn't know what he's talking about until he pulls out a piece of paper from his other pocket. She could read the writing from fifty feet because it's not in English, it's Cyrillic, and it's a bit of a dispatch she wrote in Brunete in 1937. "Clarence Fendley wasn't the mole in the BBC - not the only one, at any rate. It's been you, the whole time."

***

She can't speak, can't move, and he takes her silence for the confession it is. 

"You killed Clarence, didn't you?" he asks, and after she nods, tightly, he blanches, grips onto the corner of her desk to steady himself. "Another man might ask why."

"You won't."

"No. You did what you thought needed to be done. You always do. Is that - is that what happened in Barcelona?"

His voice breaks, and he grabs for a stack of Telex reports on her desk. Begins putting them in chronological order, alphabetical by country of origin, she can see him laying out New York above Tunis, shuffling one from November to the back of the pile. She still can't answer, and he continues, his voice rising louder as he attempts to get it out.

"It must have been. Clean break, get out while the _nacionales_ were attacking, leave everything behind. Everyone. I - at first I thought you'd been killed. It's what you meant, disappearing then. I imagined dozens of ways you'd died, gunshot wounds, bombings, bayonet, grenade . . . I mourned you, for years, and when I met a woman in Zaragoza who told me there'd been a tall, English woman there only days after you disappeared, I started digging. You stayed in Zaragoza for a week, left, they said, under armed escort to Grenada. So I went to Grenada, and I found the cottage with the lemon trees. Julia remembers you, you know. Remembers how you loved lemonade during the pregnancy."

"Fuck," she curses, first in English and then Russian. "Fuck, she - you were never -"

"Never what?" He tears the report in his hands, drops it to begin lining up her pens and pencils by height and color. "Never supposed to know we had a daughter? Well, I do. Don't worry, Julia wouldn't tell me anything about where you'd gone after Grenada, or where Sofia is. Formidable agent, that woman, strong. Cold. Not as cold as you - did you ever look for her? Do you know if she's safe?"

And it's ripped out of her - the tears, the words, the confession he wants.

"No. Is that what you want to hear? I don't know what you imagine a Soviet spy can do, but I was an asset in Spain, a cog in a machine. I never even - I've never seen her. Held her. Orders, you understand. I tried to find out where they were taking her. She - they told me she'd be sent to live with two agents. They couldn't have children, and I was . . . I was providing _Мат'Россия_ with an invaluable service."

He turns the dictaphone on her desk once, twice, then back to where it had been. Curls his hands into fists and yet cannot look away from her. "Is that - were we a means to an end?"

"Please, if you don't listen to anything else I have to say, hear me on this. You gave me my daughter. They were going to kill me for treason, for being compromised, until they found out I was pregnant. You saved both our lives."

Randall doesn't move, silent as the grave and as inevitable. She holds her breath, and slowly, finally, he steps backward, clearing her way to the door.

"If you run now, I'll give you 24 hours before I tell them everything. But Alexis . . . I would advise you not to do so. Because I will never stop looking for you, for Sofia, as long as I live, and if that puts you in danger, I will not be able to protect you."

"And my second option?"

"Stay," he whispers. "We'll do it together. We'll find her, no matter what."

The tears fall - stupid, foolish, brilliant man. Setting himself against the entire Russian secret police and ministry of defense for her. He hasn't changed a bit.

**Author's Note:**

> шпион = shpion/spy  
> Мат'Россия = Mat'Rossiya/Mother Russia


End file.
